You realize that Bitcoin objectively has those exact same qualities, right
You will note that my comment was about bitcoin's valuation, not that it lacked certain qualities. If the price of gold had increased by approximately two orders of magnitude within in a year (like bitcoin has) then I would say that its valuation was absurd too.
I am not a gold fetishist. I perceive it as the most popular store of wealth of the type that is fairly immune to government tampering. However, these stores of wealth are not intrinsically appreciating investments, unlike, say, equities or bonds.
Oh, and I apologize for straying so far off topic: fuck Beta, and fuck the corporate doublespeak they tried to feed us yesterday. We know they haven't considered actually changing course. "We hear you, and so we're going to wait until the furor dies down a bit and then do it anyway..."
I don't understand how bitcoins or gold either one retain their values.
Bitcoin is a bubble, though as with every other bubble there are delusional people who assert the emperor is not naked/that it all somehow makes sense. It doesn't... the valuation is absurd.
As for gold, I think the explanation is a mixture of inertia, rarity, resistance to governmental manipulation, and lack of corrosion.
Being able to beat it into a thin leaf is not a real explanation ("ZOMG! You can hammer this *how* thin?! SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!" said essentially no one ever). Saying it is valuable for jewelry begs the question (i.e. it's valuable for jewelry because its rare and expensive, but it's supposedly rare and expensive because it's valuable for jewelry?)
So, it really comes down to "it's always been this way", but everyone can be reasonably certain that there won't be a sudden massive increase in supply, and that their holdings of gold won't corrode away into nothing. Furthermore, the government cannot simply pass a law saying that there is now twice as much gold as there was yesterday; this security against manipulation is certainly a valuable feature (well, unless you believe Krugman, who thinks that the government should always be able to manipulate currencies).
You don't know much about the music business do you? Did you know that there was once a lawsuit claiming in damages more money than actually exists on the planet? 666000 Would be a very small sum for a music lawsuit.
Yeah. All I could think was "Only $666,000? Maybe they thought they could only prove a single instance of infringement." I mean, last I heard, *two* infringements is eleventy billion GDPs worth of damage, according to the MAFIAA.
Oh, and Beta? I hope you get fucked by Satan's goat cock, in hell.
What U.S. state do you live in that charges sales tax but doesn't require you to report use tax on your income tax return?
No one pays use tax. Have you ever done so? Hell, a few years back a newspaper in my city ran a story about use tax on internet sales and they reported that the state Department of Revenue told them that the previous year there had been fewer than 200 use tax returns filed in the whole state. I decided to look up how many people the Department of Revenue employed—it's far, far more than 200.
2 - Which of the following is not an acceptable target to nuke?
I would check all of them.
WRONG! The correct answer is Luxembourg.
All the rest of these places need to reap the destruction they so richly deserve (New York especially). New Zealand is included simply because we're jealous of their gratuitous natural beauty.
The warheads were only Megatons because they were fusion weapons.
We only used the fission trigger part to generate power'
Your pedantry is misplaced: your error is thinking of the warheads individually.
Instead, there were ~20k nuclear warheads worth of HEU involved (500 metric tons). Since even the inefficient gun-type Little Boy weapon had an estimated yield of 15 kt for 64 kg of HEU, the program represents a minimum of 120 megatons worth of yield—even falsely presuming they couldn't achieve better yields with that HEU than using a gun-type weapon approach.
This is probably nothing that should surprise or alert the average US citizen.
I have a vivid memory of watching congressional testimony by top Boeing executives over 20 years ago where they swore up and down that they did not want any help from american spy agencies.
I know I'm cynical, but I always sigh when I see testimony from business leaders or politicians. We all know they are pathological liars, so why do we have to put ourselves through this charade where we summon them simply to have them look us in the eyes and lie to us?
Thanks. I already use R as appropriate. Your overly generalized comment about spreadsheets being inappropriate will be taken under advisement.
The satire of the row offset is based on the fact that once there is enough data that there are rows offscreen, *I don't want to have to care* what the final row in the data is... I want to apply the function to the entire column. Excel makes this easy with full column references like B:B, whereas with Calc one has to come up with a guess for a final row number that will include all the data (current and future). Hence, inputting some farcically large final row reference, which, incidentally, makes the damn formula unnecessarily long.
You are correct, the time lost in incarceration is irrevocable. but unlike death, incarceration can be ended when and error is discovered. Your reasoning is sort of an all or nothing fallacy.
Not really. Because you have already conceded that death is an appropriate punishment in the case of evil, we are discussing the case where death is wrongfully administered to an innocent. I am comparing the scenarios where one is wrongfully accused and convicted, and presume the alternative to capital punishment is life without parole. If one's innocence is never discovered, then one will die in prison... effectively, this miscarriage of justice has cost the person the rest of their natural life. The death penalty costs the person the rest of their natural life, as well as foreshortening it.
For the record, I also believe that an overdose protocol such as was used in this instance is more humane of a mechanism than the classical three-drug cocktail. Who the hell invented that debacle, anyway?
You seem to bravely step forward into the role of the victim, but I suspect that if you were being really dragged down the hall to the gas chamber, that you would not be nearly as composed or as staunch in your belief.
Meh, I consider this kind of risk tantamount to the risk of being killed in a terrorist attack in a free country (well, in one that stood by its principles, that is). Or, for that matter, being drafted to fight in a war I don't agree with and thus being killed in combat. Or being imprisoned for life for a crime I didn't commit. Call these some of the risks inherent to society.
Anyway, it's these tiny risks that humans have trouble properly intellectually assimilating. Yes, someone is always going to win the lottery. Maybe it will be you, but in all likelihood it won't be. I registered for Selective Service as society requires, yet I wasn't drafted during the years of my eligibility. Much in the same way, we all run these risks together—and occasionally someone is sent to die.
Who is actually willing to die forty years too soon because a deputy sheriff didn't seal an evidence bag properly?
The common aspect is the miscarriage of justice. You are fixated on the deprivation of forty years of your life (which would, in all likelihood, be entirely spent incarcerated). I am fixated on the wrongful conviction as the problem, and don't perceive a significant difference between dying in prison after 40 years of wrongful imprisonment vs. being wrongfully executed.
Further, to turn around your comment to me, you seem to have an all or nothing demand of perfection for administering the death penalty. While extremely high standards need to be in place, I don't think the expectation of perfection is necessary or practical. I also realize that we are unlikely to sway the opinion of each other.
'capital punishment': clever, but nobody likes a spelling Nazi.
Ah, no one can take constructive criticism anymore. I thought you would appreciate the chance to learn the correct term. I also thought you might appreciate that I waited until the end to mention this in passing rather than attempting to provoke an emotional response by taunting you. Would you have preferred I had left it to the AC trolls to just mock you and let you learn of your mistake that way? Well, I see from other posts that they delivered on that count...
Regardless, the correct form is easy to remember because "capital" refers to the head (e.g. "per capita")... ergo, "punishment on the head".
If we can me completely certain that there never will be an error in a capitol crime sentencing, I would advocate immediately dropping the killer in a wood chipper head first. However, being as there is always going to be some error in the legal system the question we should be asking is, "How many innocent people are we willing to murder in the name of revenge/justice?"
I'm sympathetic to this line of reasoning; however, by logical extension you must also be against any sort of punishment for criminals at all. For while death is a permanent, irrevocable punishment, so is any form of wrongful incarceration. You can't undo the loss of a portion of a life wrongly spent in prison (and no, monetary compensation isn't equivalent).
Ultimately, the answer is yes, some small level of error must be acceptable in the criminal justice system, or we must otherwise let all the accused go free. I am willing to accept this in the death penalty as well.
And if you're asking me whether I, as an innocent person, would prefer an overdose of opiod narcotics and tranquilizers (i.e. what this admitted criminal received) vs a lifetime spent incarcerated, then yes I would. Just like I would be willing to risk death by terrorist rather than have this country sacrifice all our ideals (as we unfortunately did instead, during the past 12 years).
FYI: the term is "capital punishment", unless you are using a synecdoche to refer to penalizing Congress (and who doesn't dream of that?)
What's happening is that victims are canceling those cards and everyone is on the lookout for. So, when the Russian hackers try to sell or use them, they're not going to work.
Their booty is worthless.
Who's to say this wasn't the goal? Perhaps the actual goal was to adversely affect Target or the US card processing regime.
Where would one fence eleventy billion credit card numbers, anyway? It's not like this a tenable amount, considering the depth of market for stolen credit card numbers.
Yeah, I've heard good things about TheyFit. The problem is they're not allowed to sell to/in the US (FDA regulations or some such thing; I didn't look at the details). Your average convenience store shelf (at least everywhere I've lived) has only standard and magnum. So I wish success upon TheyFit, and I hope other, similar companies start up, and I think Mr. Gate's money could have some weight in starting that. -- Everything is better with chainsaws.
Just FYI, your sig is particularly disturbing in this context.
Smallpox has been absent since the 70's, and hasn't show up yet... So if the premise is the same with polio, yes we can say that it is extinct... I think.
I think it only exists in one CDC facility and one research / germ warfare facility in siberia, now.
Meh. I'm sure it exists in other places as well. For example, the sequence for smallpox is well-known, so it could be reconstructed by a government even if those samples were destroyed. Furthermore, there's always the random serendipity of as-yet undiscovered samples: Century-old smallpox scabs in N.M. envelope (found in a library, of all places...)
However, I concur that the disease is extinct in the wild, and, barring malfeasance, there will never be another epidemic of smallpox.
We don't have the money to spend on foreign aid and foreign wars either. Let's stop those first, before directly harming Americans.
Hell, if we're talking about stopping government actions that directly harm Americans *and* saving money, let's first cease the War on (Some) Intoxicants and disband all the agencies involved with it.
...and no immediately creating a new enforcement regime as a sinceure for all these former DEA agents (et al), either. One major reason we have such a bloated ATF is that government couldn't bring itself to lay off the Prohibition era agents once alcohol was legalized again. So, they made work for these agents, perpetuating the the cancer-like nature of bureaucratic growth.
Only of the last 18 years or so...and that's saying something. So in Canada we rolled out chip&pin over 5 years ago converting everything(it's been available a bit longer than that). CC companies in the US have been dragging their feet over it for the last 5 years.
I believe I read once that the chip & pin regime causes the burden of proof for fraud to fall on the account holder. As in "prove these charges on your account weren't you". Right now in the states, the burden of proof does not lie with the account holder, so if this reversal of liability with chip & pin is true then I would not consider chip & pin an "upgrade"/improvement.
Right now, I give not a fuck about credit card fraud because I am charged nothing if it happens (I'm only slightly inconvenienced by having to wait for the issuance of a new card). If I am potentially liable for fraud when someone defeats the security of the chip & pin point of sale device, but I can't prove it, then no thanks.
This distills to semantics, and I'm not certain we share working definitions. As you said in another post:
And even if I'm proven false, 99.9% is not 100%. We can't cure cancer 100% just like we can't manufacture hard drives with a 0% failure rate.
Based on this type of definition, practically no disease has ever been (or ever will be) cured, given that all cures have some nonzero failure rate. I anticipate you have already found, through interactions with others, that this type of definition is uncommon semantics. That is to say, most people will believe that a disease is cured even if the cure fails in some tiny fraction of cases.
Integrate a tiny fraction of risk over an infinite amount of time, and eventually everyone will die of that risk (unless the rabbits get them first). Immortality via lack of senescence (rather than supernatural invulnerability) would fit that type of scenario. I presume that people would believe cancer is effectively cured once the risk of death via cancer metastasis/cerebral failure from tumor is lower than the risk of death via peacetime accidents/violence.
We aren't debating whether some fundamental theorem of mathematics will be overturned...
A correctly proven theorem can't be overturned in its system.
Exactly. My insinuation was that is a case where it may be appropriate to use pronouncements like "will never happen", unlike, say, discussing an as yet unsolved biological engineering problem.
I see you have brought the machine analogies into play.
Are you conflating "cure" for cancer with "complete prevention" then? To go back to the machine analogy, I believe it is sufficient to define a machine as "not failing" if it can be repaired. I agree with you that machines inevitably fail; however, I don't automatically conflate that with permanent failure.
Dropping the analogies, if your sole claim is that we will never be able to prevent each and every individual cell from accumulating mutations and failing to undergo apoptosis when critical failures have accumulated, then you may be correct (likely because that problem isn't worth solving). If you are claiming that we will never be able to prevent a single, uncontrolled mutant cell from eventually causing death from metastatic disease (or cerebral disruption) then I suggest you are being fatalistic.
My comment about the rabbits was intended to point out the tautology of any type of claim that cancer will kill you if nothing else does. I believe Larry Niven once threw out a plausible stat that "immortality is ~200 years of life", mostly due to the accumulated odds of accidental death. To put it in terms of biological engineering, we may not be able to reduce the risk of metastatic disease to zero, but we may have a practical "cure" that reduces the risk to a practically infinitesimal level.
The machine isn't permanently broken if it can be repaired.
My rejoinder to you is that history is littered with incorrect pronouncements that certain feats could never be accomplished.
We aren't debating whether some fundamental theorem of mathematics will be overturned, but rather whether some biological engineering problem could *ever* be solved. AC posited that the cancer problem is completely unsolvable, now or ever, without proof.
Who wants to be remembered as that one guy who declared that powered flight was impossible?
Finally, to paraphrase the summary, if you live long enough, and nothing else kills you first, then eventually you will be killed by a husk of rabbits.
Slashdot Mirror
You realize that Bitcoin objectively has those exact same qualities, right
You will note that my comment was about bitcoin's valuation, not that it lacked certain qualities. If the price of gold had increased by approximately two orders of magnitude within in a year (like bitcoin has) then I would say that its valuation was absurd too.
I am not a gold fetishist. I perceive it as the most popular store of wealth of the type that is fairly immune to government tampering. However, these stores of wealth are not intrinsically appreciating investments, unlike, say, equities or bonds.
Oh, and I apologize for straying so far off topic: fuck Beta, and fuck the corporate doublespeak they tried to feed us yesterday. We know they haven't considered actually changing course. "We hear you, and so we're going to wait until the furor dies down a bit and then do it anyway..."
I don't understand how bitcoins or gold either one retain their values.
Bitcoin is a bubble, though as with every other bubble there are delusional people who assert the emperor is not naked/that it all somehow makes sense. It doesn't... the valuation is absurd.
As for gold, I think the explanation is a mixture of inertia, rarity, resistance to governmental manipulation, and lack of corrosion.
Being able to beat it into a thin leaf is not a real explanation ("ZOMG! You can hammer this *how* thin?! SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!" said essentially no one ever). Saying it is valuable for jewelry begs the question (i.e. it's valuable for jewelry because its rare and expensive, but it's supposedly rare and expensive because it's valuable for jewelry?)
So, it really comes down to "it's always been this way", but everyone can be reasonably certain that there won't be a sudden massive increase in supply, and that their holdings of gold won't corrode away into nothing. Furthermore, the government cannot simply pass a law saying that there is now twice as much gold as there was yesterday; this security against manipulation is certainly a valuable feature (well, unless you believe Krugman, who thinks that the government should always be able to manipulate currencies).
Cut this shit out. Revert. Take the DICE Marketing department out for a nice big lunch, drinks and all. Then...
Damn, I was hoping you were going to go in a more Game of Thrones-style direction at this juncture.
You don't know much about the music business do you? Did you know that there was once a lawsuit claiming in damages more money than actually exists on the planet? 666000 Would be a very small sum for a music lawsuit.
Yeah. All I could think was "Only $666,000? Maybe they thought they could only prove a single instance of infringement." I mean, last I heard, *two* infringements is eleventy billion GDPs worth of damage, according to the MAFIAA.
Oh, and Beta? I hope you get fucked by Satan's goat cock, in hell.
This circus of layered tread marks is not shedding much light.
Good lord, *where* do you shop for your metaphors?!
Unfortunately the ultrasonics cause a Karman vortex street, which has been known to induce panic, particularly in snow hikers.
No, no, NO!
Infrasound causes Karman vortices, ultrasound causes spontaneous combustion and pregnancy. Please stop spreading misinformation.
What U.S. state do you live in that charges sales tax but doesn't require you to report use tax on your income tax return?
No one pays use tax. Have you ever done so? Hell, a few years back a newspaper in my city ran a story about use tax on internet sales and they reported that the state Department of Revenue told them that the previous year there had been fewer than 200 use tax returns filed in the whole state. I decided to look up how many people the Department of Revenue employed—it's far, far more than 200.
No one pays use tax, not even the tax collectors.
2 - Which of the following is not an acceptable target to nuke?
I would check all of them.
WRONG! The correct answer is Luxembourg.
All the rest of these places need to reap the destruction they so richly deserve (New York especially). New Zealand is included simply because we're jealous of their gratuitous natural beauty.
Anyhow, we're just waiting for an excuse.
The warheads were only Megatons because they were fusion weapons.
We only used the fission trigger part to generate power'
Your pedantry is misplaced: your error is thinking of the warheads individually.
Instead, there were ~20k nuclear warheads worth of HEU involved (500 metric tons). Since even the inefficient gun-type Little Boy weapon had an estimated yield of 15 kt for 64 kg of HEU, the program represents a minimum of 120 megatons worth of yield—even falsely presuming they couldn't achieve better yields with that HEU than using a gun-type weapon approach.
The program's name is perfectly cromulent.
This is probably nothing that should surprise or alert the average US citizen.
I have a vivid memory of watching congressional testimony by top Boeing executives over 20 years ago where they swore up and down that they did not want any help from american spy agencies.
I know I'm cynical, but I always sigh when I see testimony from business leaders or politicians. We all know they are pathological liars, so why do we have to put ourselves through this charade where we summon them simply to have them look us in the eyes and lie to us?
It's... masochistic.
Thanks. I already use R as appropriate. Your overly generalized comment about spreadsheets being inappropriate will be taken under advisement.
The satire of the row offset is based on the fact that once there is enough data that there are rows offscreen, *I don't want to have to care* what the final row in the data is... I want to apply the function to the entire column. Excel makes this easy with full column references like B:B, whereas with Calc one has to come up with a guess for a final row number that will include all the data (current and future). Hence, inputting some farcically large final row reference, which, incidentally, makes the damn formula unnecessarily long.
Open Office and Libre Office *really* need the Excel equivalent (Calc) to be able to print better (like zooming, fit to page, select a range).
How about having a chart as a sheet to itself? Has either project ever gotten around to that?
Polynomial regression trendlines? Passing an entire column as a range to a function (e.g. SUM(A:A) rather than SUM(A1:A1195756262959999287362))?
Calc makes me a Sad Panda.
You are correct, the time lost in incarceration is irrevocable. but unlike death, incarceration can be ended when and error is discovered. Your reasoning is sort of an all or nothing fallacy.
Not really. Because you have already conceded that death is an appropriate punishment in the case of evil, we are discussing the case where death is wrongfully administered to an innocent. I am comparing the scenarios where one is wrongfully accused and convicted, and presume the alternative to capital punishment is life without parole. If one's innocence is never discovered, then one will die in prison... effectively, this miscarriage of justice has cost the person the rest of their natural life. The death penalty costs the person the rest of their natural life, as well as foreshortening it.
For the record, I also believe that an overdose protocol such as was used in this instance is more humane of a mechanism than the classical three-drug cocktail. Who the hell invented that debacle, anyway?
You seem to bravely step forward into the role of the victim, but I suspect that if you were being really dragged down the hall to the gas chamber, that you would not be nearly as composed or as staunch in your belief.
Meh, I consider this kind of risk tantamount to the risk of being killed in a terrorist attack in a free country (well, in one that stood by its principles, that is). Or, for that matter, being drafted to fight in a war I don't agree with and thus being killed in combat. Or being imprisoned for life for a crime I didn't commit. Call these some of the risks inherent to society.
Anyway, it's these tiny risks that humans have trouble properly intellectually assimilating. Yes, someone is always going to win the lottery. Maybe it will be you, but in all likelihood it won't be. I registered for Selective Service as society requires, yet I wasn't drafted during the years of my eligibility. Much in the same way, we all run these risks together—and occasionally someone is sent to die.
Who is actually willing to die forty years too soon because a deputy sheriff didn't seal an evidence bag properly?
The common aspect is the miscarriage of justice. You are fixated on the deprivation of forty years of your life (which would, in all likelihood, be entirely spent incarcerated). I am fixated on the wrongful conviction as the problem, and don't perceive a significant difference between dying in prison after 40 years of wrongful imprisonment vs. being wrongfully executed.
Further, to turn around your comment to me, you seem to have an all or nothing demand of perfection for administering the death penalty. While extremely high standards need to be in place, I don't think the expectation of perfection is necessary or practical. I also realize that we are unlikely to sway the opinion of each other.
'capital punishment': clever, but nobody likes a spelling Nazi.
Ah, no one can take constructive criticism anymore. I thought you would appreciate the chance to learn the correct term. I also thought you might appreciate that I waited until the end to mention this in passing rather than attempting to provoke an emotional response by taunting you. Would you have preferred I had left it to the AC trolls to just mock you and let you learn of your mistake that way? Well, I see from other posts that they delivered on that count...
Regardless, the correct form is easy to remember because "capital" refers to the head (e.g. "per capita")... ergo, "punishment on the head".
If we can me completely certain that there never will be an error in a capitol crime sentencing, I would advocate immediately dropping the killer in a wood chipper head first. However, being as there is always going to be some error in the legal system the question we should be asking is, "How many innocent people are we willing to murder in the name of revenge/justice?"
I'm sympathetic to this line of reasoning; however, by logical extension you must also be against any sort of punishment for criminals at all. For while death is a permanent, irrevocable punishment, so is any form of wrongful incarceration. You can't undo the loss of a portion of a life wrongly spent in prison (and no, monetary compensation isn't equivalent).
Ultimately, the answer is yes, some small level of error must be acceptable in the criminal justice system, or we must otherwise let all the accused go free. I am willing to accept this in the death penalty as well.
And if you're asking me whether I, as an innocent person, would prefer an overdose of opiod narcotics and tranquilizers (i.e. what this admitted criminal received) vs a lifetime spent incarcerated, then yes I would. Just like I would be willing to risk death by terrorist rather than have this country sacrifice all our ideals (as we unfortunately did instead, during the past 12 years).
FYI: the term is "capital punishment", unless you are using a synecdoche to refer to penalizing Congress (and who doesn't dream of that?)
What's happening is that victims are canceling those cards and everyone is on the lookout for. So, when the Russian hackers try to sell or use them, they're not going to work.
Their booty is worthless.
Who's to say this wasn't the goal? Perhaps the actual goal was to adversely affect Target or the US card processing regime.
Where would one fence eleventy billion credit card numbers, anyway? It's not like this a tenable amount, considering the depth of market for stolen credit card numbers.
Yeah, I've heard good things about TheyFit. The problem is they're not allowed to sell to/in the US (FDA regulations or some such thing; I didn't look at the details). Your average convenience store shelf (at least everywhere I've lived) has only standard and magnum. So I wish success upon TheyFit, and I hope other, similar companies start up, and I think Mr. Gate's money could have some weight in starting that.
--
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Just FYI, your sig is particularly disturbing in this context.
Smallpox has been absent since the 70's, and hasn't show up yet... So if the premise is the same with polio, yes we can say that it is extinct... I think.
I think it only exists in one CDC facility and one research / germ warfare facility in siberia, now.
Meh. I'm sure it exists in other places as well. For example, the sequence for smallpox is well-known, so it could be reconstructed by a government even if those samples were destroyed. Furthermore, there's always the random serendipity of as-yet undiscovered samples:
Century-old smallpox scabs in N.M. envelope (found in a library, of all places...)
However, I concur that the disease is extinct in the wild, and, barring malfeasance, there will never be another epidemic of smallpox.
We don't have the money to spend on foreign aid and foreign wars either. Let's stop those first, before directly harming Americans.
Hell, if we're talking about stopping government actions that directly harm Americans *and* saving money, let's first cease the War on (Some) Intoxicants and disband all the agencies involved with it.
Only 5 years? Are you new to IT?
Only of the last 18 years or so...and that's saying something. So in Canada we rolled out chip&pin over 5 years ago converting everything(it's been available a bit longer than that). CC companies in the US have been dragging their feet over it for the last 5 years.
I believe I read once that the chip & pin regime causes the burden of proof for fraud to fall on the account holder. As in "prove these charges on your account weren't you". Right now in the states, the burden of proof does not lie with the account holder, so if this reversal of liability with chip & pin is true then I would not consider chip & pin an "upgrade"/improvement.
Right now, I give not a fuck about credit card fraud because I am charged nothing if it happens (I'm only slightly inconvenienced by having to wait for the issuance of a new card). If I am potentially liable for fraud when someone defeats the security of the chip & pin point of sale device, but I can't prove it, then no thanks.
ATF is actually about as much law enforcement as the FBI should be about 'National Security'. It's actually primarily a tax agency ala IRS.
Historically this was accurate: until 2002, the ATF was part of the Department of Treasury. It's part of the Department of Justice now.
Perhaps you were speaking about its de facto role, but I believe it is noteworthy to mention the current organizational hierarchy.
This distills to semantics, and I'm not certain we share working definitions. As you said in another post:
And even if I'm proven false, 99.9% is not 100%. We can't cure cancer 100% just like we can't manufacture hard drives with a 0% failure rate.
Based on this type of definition, practically no disease has ever been (or ever will be) cured, given that all cures have some nonzero failure rate. I anticipate you have already found, through interactions with others, that this type of definition is uncommon semantics. That is to say, most people will believe that a disease is cured even if the cure fails in some tiny fraction of cases.
Integrate a tiny fraction of risk over an infinite amount of time, and eventually everyone will die of that risk (unless the rabbits get them first). Immortality via lack of senescence (rather than supernatural invulnerability) would fit that type of scenario. I presume that people would believe cancer is effectively cured once the risk of death via cancer metastasis/cerebral failure from tumor is lower than the risk of death via peacetime accidents/violence.
As a former resident of the state, I would like to register my vote for Michigawegian.
We aren't debating whether some fundamental theorem of mathematics will be overturned...
A correctly proven theorem can't be overturned in its system.
Exactly. My insinuation was that is a case where it may be appropriate to use pronouncements like "will never happen", unlike, say, discussing an as yet unsolved biological engineering problem.
I see you have brought the machine analogies into play.
Are you conflating "cure" for cancer with "complete prevention" then? To go back to the machine analogy, I believe it is sufficient to define a machine as "not failing" if it can be repaired. I agree with you that machines inevitably fail; however, I don't automatically conflate that with permanent failure.
Dropping the analogies, if your sole claim is that we will never be able to prevent each and every individual cell from accumulating mutations and failing to undergo apoptosis when critical failures have accumulated, then you may be correct (likely because that problem isn't worth solving). If you are claiming that we will never be able to prevent a single, uncontrolled mutant cell from eventually causing death from metastatic disease (or cerebral disruption) then I suggest you are being fatalistic.
My comment about the rabbits was intended to point out the tautology of any type of claim that cancer will kill you if nothing else does. I believe Larry Niven once threw out a plausible stat that "immortality is ~200 years of life", mostly due to the accumulated odds of accidental death. To put it in terms of biological engineering, we may not be able to reduce the risk of metastatic disease to zero, but we may have a practical "cure" that reduces the risk to a practically infinitesimal level.
The machine isn't permanently broken if it can be repaired.
My rejoinder to you is that history is littered with incorrect pronouncements that certain feats could never be accomplished.
We aren't debating whether some fundamental theorem of mathematics will be overturned, but rather whether some biological engineering problem could *ever* be solved. AC posited that the cancer problem is completely unsolvable, now or ever, without proof.
Who wants to be remembered as that one guy who declared that powered flight was impossible?
Finally, to paraphrase the summary, if you live long enough, and nothing else kills you first, then eventually you will be killed by a husk of rabbits.